The recycling of old corrugated cardboard (OCC), OCC scrap, and other waste paper is ecologically responsible, cost effective, and more efficient than making of virgin cardboard and other paper. Currently, waste paper recycling supports a large and growing industry in the Unites States and elsewhere. Generally, OCC and waste paper is compacted into relatively compact bales and transported to recycling centers for processing. For example, a grocery or retail store may have a small paper baler on-site that it uses to compress empty cardboard boxes into bales that can be picked up and transported to a recycling center. Paper bales created at such on-site locations may typically weight around one thousand pounds each and are known in the industry as low density bales.
Low density paper bales generally have been acceptable for transporting domestically from individual store locations to recycling centers and the like. However, markets for OCC and other scrap paper are growing rapidly in China and other countries. Transporting baled OCC and other waste paper internationally to these countries involves filling shipping containers with bales and transporting the containers abroad by container ship, which is expensive. A typical shipping container has a target weight capacity of between about 50,000 pounds and 60,000 pounds to obtain the most economical shipping cost per container. However, a container load of low density paper bales weighs significantly less than this target. Thus, it has been common to rebale these low density bales into higher density bales that meet the target weight when loaded into shipping containers to transporting abroad. It can also be more efficient to transport high density paper bales domestically since a higher tonnage can be transported on a single truck.
Paper rebaling generally has been done at central locations such as retail distribution centers to which low density paper bales are back-hauled from individual stores, or at recycling centers. This is due in part to the fact that machines for rebaling paper from low density paper bales into high density paper bales have been large, very expensive, and relatively complex to operate. In a typical high density rebaler, low density bales are placed on a conveyor and the binding wires are cut by an operator to free the baled paper. The conveyor carries the unbound bales up to the inlet of a vertically fed hydraulic baling machine, where they fall from the end of the end of the conveyor into the hopper of the baling machine. In the process, the unbound bales fall apart and the loose paper drops into the breach of the baling machine. When the breach is full, a hydraulic compression ram driven by a main cylinder compresses the paper into a compression chamber to form a high density mass of paper. The ram may cycle two or three times in this manner until a sufficient mass of compressed paper is pressed into the compression chamber to comprise a high density bale. The resulting high density bale is then bound with wire or other bindings and ejected from the baler for storage and transport. The process is generally inefficient due at least partially to the multiple cycling of the ram per bale and the process is sufficiently complex that it generally must be monitored and controlled by computer controllers. In addition, at least two workers generally are required to load bales onto the conveyor and cut the bindings before the bales are conveyed to the hopper of the baling machine.
There is a need for a waste paper rebaler for creating high density paper bales from lower density paper bales that is smaller, is fed from the side rather than the top, is simpler to operate, less expensive, and that does not require that the bindings of low density bales be removed or that the low density bales be unbound and their paper re-disbursed prior to the rebaling process. It is to the provision of such a rebaler and to a corresponding method of rebaling that the present disclosure is primarily directed.